Reader's guide to a moral maze

A German lawyer and judge, the son of a pastor, he trained as a masseur and made jewellery before writing crime fiction. He found international success with a controversial post-Holocaust novel. Can he repeat that success with his new book? Nicholas Wroe reports

Of all the ways literature has found to deal with the Holocaust and its consequences, a book about the inability to read might not seem the most obvious. Yet in terms of attracting a mass audience, a German novel with illiteracy at its heart, published in 1995, has been a publishing phenomenon.

The Reader was the fourth novel by Bernhard Schlink, a 57-year-old professor of the philosophy of law and a part-time judge in Germany. Schlink's latest book, a collection of stories called Flights Of Love, is published in Britain this month. Whether it can match the extraordinary success of his best-selling novel has yet to be seen.

The Reader opens in post-war Germany when a 15-year-old boy, Michael, embarks on an affair with a 36-year-old woman, Hanna, who disappears, then years later turns up in the dock as a former concentration camp guard accused of the mass murder of Jewish women locked in a burning church. Michael, by now a law student observing the trial, realises that Hanna is a secret illiterate, a fact that has profoundly affected her actions in the past as well as fatally undermining her defence in court.

Schlink says that writing about illiteracy "was there when I started to think about the book. I did a great deal of research into it, but I never had an objective beyond telling that story. I'm sure the things I think about and worry about in other contexts play into the stories I write. But I do not know how they do that, and I'm really uninterested in the epistemology of my writing."

The theme certainly chimes, in terms of dramatically echoing the Third Reich's moral illiteracy, but the way the book has been enthusiastically taken up and used almost as documentary points to an impact that has far exceeded Schlink's immediate narrative ambitions. You have to go back to Patrick Süskind's 1985 novel, Perfume, for a comparable German international best-seller, and to the likes of Nobel laureates Günter Grass and Heinrich Böll in the 60s for German novels that have prompted such detailed critical scrutiny.

The Reader has sold 500,000 copies in Germany, 750,000 in America (where in 1999 it was featured on Oprah Winfrey's book club), and 100,000 in France. In Britain, where it has sold 200,000, it has had a remarkable endorsement. In 1999 the Department for Education and Employment published a comprehensive study of illiteracy and innumeracy. Its forward, by Sir Claus Moser, chairman of the Basic Skills Agency, used an illustration of the devastating effects of illiteracy, taken not from research, case study or personal experience, but from The Reader. It outlined the advance made by Hanna "from dependence to independence", describing it as "a step towards liberation".

The Reader has been translated into 25 languages, is about to be filmed by The English Patient director Anthony Minghella, and is a set text on school and university syllabuses internationally. George Steiner said it was the book reviewer's "sole and privileged function to say as loudly as he is able, 'read this' and 'read it again'."

Dr Barbara Honrath of the Goethe Institute, the organisation responsible for promoting German culture abroad, says the book was particularly successful in the English-speaking world.

"For a long time contemporary German writing was considered serious and difficult and not a particularly good read. That has now changed and the positive response to Schlink's book has helped make publishers more open to other new writers."

But the book has also been vehemently criticised, particularly for the idea that Hanna's illiteracy is somehow an excuse for her actions. The writer Frederick Raphael said, "no-one could recommend The Reader without having a tin ear for fiction and a blind eye for evil".

Writer and critic Cynthia Ozick claimed the novel "is the product, conscious or not, of a desire to divert [attention] from the culpability of a normally educated population in a nation famed for Kultur".

Professor Frank Finlay, head of the German department at Leeds University, has written about the problematic use of literacy in The Reader. He says that while the book doesn't fit into the usual model of post-war German literary fiction - which has often tended to be cerebral, avant-garde and difficult - it does reflect on-going recent strands of debate in both German publishing and thought.

"Sometimes 80% of German bestseller lists can be made up of foreign writers; people such as Isobel Allende or Nick Hornby," says Finlay. "German publishers have had great difficulty selling German writers to German audiences, so some have been looking for more accessible fiction, more Anglo-Saxon style German fiction, and Schlink fitted the bill. This has coincided with increased interest in the Holocaust sparked on one level by things like Schindler's List, but also by events in Rwanda and Bosnia which made many think again about why people, and not just Germans, do these things."

Following reunification in 1989, with the increased distance from the past and the apparent closure of the chapter on the second world war, there have also been more demands to treat Germany like a normal state again. This has been reflected in the way perpetrators of war crimes have been depicted in fiction: for the first time characters who perpetrated crimes could be ordinary people and even possess some redeeming features, albeit ordinary people, like Hanna, who committed appalling crimes.

"People like Grass were writing in the 50s about the impact of the Third Reich," explains Finlay, "but this focus on the perpetrators is new to the 90s. There is a genre of German fiction called 'father literature' which represents the May '68 generation looking, sometimes literally, at what their parents did in the war.

The Reader has developed this in terms of being more critical of Schlink's own generation and adopting a more subtle approach to perpetrators." His new book, a collection of loosely linked stories called Flights Of Love (Liebesfluchten in German), subtly develops many of the themes presented in The Reader with one character even asking the question, "what did father do in the war?"

Again the dilemmas of doing the right thing - which most often means taking the least worst option - and the accommodations that must be made in order to live a good life are scrupulously explored. The legacy of a past that often was a different country - whether the GDR or the Third Reich - hangs heavy.

In one story the relationship between a young German man and a New York Jewish woman is, despite their best efforts, soured by events that took place 30 years before they were born. In another a group of old friends are forced apart when their various contacts with the GDR secret police, the Stasi, are re-examined.

In early reviews in the UK the book has received a mixed reception. Critics have praised its intelligence and sympathetic analysis, but there have also been complaints that a tendency to didacticism can stifle the stories as fiction.

Schlink explicitly sees himself as part of what has been called "the second generation". He was born in 1944 in the small town of Bethel near the city of Bielefeld, which lies towards the Dutch border. A synagogue was burnt in Bielefeld in 1937, and during the war the city sustained considerable damage from allied bombing.

Schlink's parents were theology students and his father, Edmund, became a professor in the subject. He then became a victim of Nazi persecution, rather than a perpetrator, and was sacked in 1937 for his membership of the Bekennende Kirche [the Confessing Church], followers of Martin Niemöller, the pastor who had called for them to break from the Protestant church in protest at Hitler's policies. Edmund then became a pastor and the family moved to Heidelberg when Bernhard was two.

"That was not the career my father had dreamed about," says Schlink, "but he was happy to be a pastor. His problems were mentioned at home but he never complained. As a former theological scholar, being a pastor gave him much to think about."

Schlink was the youngest of four children. His brother is an art historian and his two sisters are married to theologians. He remembers enjoying a nightly ritual after dinner when the family would settle around the table and read the bible.

"I am now much more distanced than my parents and some of my siblings from the church," he says. "But I still belong and I want to belong to the church."

Michael Schröter, a historian, first met Schlink when they were teenagers on a weekend of political and historical education. He recalls Schlink as serious-minded with well-honed debating skills.

"He had a very sharp intelligence and would always join an argument - which he usually won," recalls Schröter. "We never talked about girls or anything like that, our subject was how to live and other highbrow things, such as the meaning of life. On our first meeting I remember arguing with him all the way home about whether or not Germany was the guilty party at the start of the first world war."

By the time Schlink had finished the equivalent of grammar school he says he still didn't know what he wanted to do. "Then an old family friend, who had taught me Russian, said as I was good at history and mathematics and language I should become a lawyer. So I thought I'd give it a try and the longer I studied the more I liked it."

He graduated from the Free University in West Berlin in 1968 and then taught and studied at universities in Heidelberg, Darmstadt and Bielefeld. In 1975 he gained a PhD and became professor of constitutional and administration law in Bonn. He was made a judge in 1987 in the constitutional court in North Rhein-Westphalia, a role he still fulfils two days each month.

In 1991 he moved to the Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt and the following year to Humboldt University in what was East Berlin, where he still teaches. Even today the scruffy, ill-lit corridors and stairways at Humboldt, just a few hundred yards east of the Brandenburg Gates and the site of the former Berlin wall, recall its German Democratic Republic past.

Although Schlink's offices are bright, airy and filled with modern furniture, he keeps on his wall a gloomy painting of an east Berlin street scene made just before re-unification. He affectionately points out the makeshift sheds where people would keep their Trabant cars and the now nostalgically atmospheric dilapidated buildings.

"When I came to the university the wall had been breached but it was still officially the GDR," he explains. "East Berlin then really reminded me of what all Germany was like in the 50s. It was a great help when writing The Reader." He still enjoys teaching, answering questions and explaining things. "But I less and less enjoy the didactical and pedagogical dances I have to perform to get the students going. There is a passive consumerist mentality amongst many, who sit there and wait for the professor to motivate them. I think that is absurd. I have to make jokes to get their interest, but I suppose once I am there I'm like the old circus horse and I trot around."

Schlink's own time as a student in the 60s and early 70s coincided with momentous events in German society. He met many of those who later became protagonists in the radical student movement but says, "I was interested in it all, but not much more than that. I always hated, and still hate, mass events. Even in concerts when people clap rhythmically I find it frightening. I never liked the demonstrations when they chanted 'Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh' and then jumped three steps. I did read Marx and Lukacs and tried to follow what was going on, but we lawyers tend to be measured in our political opinions. We are not prone to become extremists."

Despite his own moderation he says he did have some understanding of those who acted differently, including the generation of activists who turned to political violence like the Red Army Faction, also called the Baader-Meinhof gang.

"From the first generation of terrorists, Gudrun Ensslin was a pastor's daughter and Ulrike Meinhof grew up in a very Christian environment. I understood this totality of believing, acting and sacrificing. In a way it was a secular version of something they had learned in their Christian upbringing. But then, with the second generation of terrorists, and to a degree with Andreas Baader too, that changed. It was much more about a disgust at the world, and more of an adventurous theme came into it; the romanticism of being an outlaw and so on."

The Baader-Meinhof gang might have been at the extreme end of the spectrum, but their generation's view of what their parents had done has been a powerful animating force in German politics in the subsequent three decades. Schlink says it was good that from the late 50s people began to question the past.

"Historians and politicians began to look into what had happened. Doctors began to look at what doctors had done during the Third Reich, we lawyers at university began to look at what our professors had done." He discovered that one of his favourite professors had written an anti-Semitic book in the 30s.

"We solved the problem of hiding things, but not how to cope with what we found and how to integrate it into our collective biography. There is the problem of loving and admiring these people yet knowing what they have done. Can one do this? I thought that professor was a wonderful man, and at the same time I couldn't accept it. We had to live with all these tensions. The '68 movement had the ambition to deal with all this, but even then I didn't know what to do about it and now I still don't know what to do. What we have to live with is that there is no solution."

Schlink says the main theme of The Reader is this generational divide and accommodation. "It is definitely not a book about the Holocaust. It is a book about how the second generation attempted to come to terms with the Holocaust and the role in it played by their fathers' generation."

Schlink denies he is an autobiographical writer, saying "because I have experienced some of these things I use them. We can only write about what we know on some topics."

He has been generally discreet about his life and family. He was married to a lawyer, Hadwig Arnold, but says he has been divorced for many years: "We were high-school sweethearts, we married very young and had our son very young. We separated and divorced when I was in my very early 30s. Looking back, I sometimes think we were very negligent in the way we dealt with our marriage. People now are so much more conscious that you can try therapy and look into what is really going wrong. But it wasn't like that.

"We thought things weren't going well and we were making each other unhappy and so we split up."

He says being single suits him "sometimes more and sometimes less. It has its rewards and privileges as well as sadnesses and depression. But married life has that too in a different way."

He is still good friends with his ex-wife and is close to his son, Jan, a dentist, who occasionally accompanies him on trips abroad for his books. Schlink started to write in the 80s after sensing something was missing in his life. "I had written a long piece of work - about data protection laws - before becoming a professor and I thought that sort of academic writing would satisfy me, but I soon wanted something more."

His early attempts to fill this gap led to some unorthodox, and short-lived, potential career try-outs. While in America he took a massage course. "I'm still a qualified masseur in the state of California," he laughs.

"It's a very portable skill so I could go back to it." Back in Germany he began to make jewellery before realising what he really missed was creative writing. He had an aunt who wrote a few pulp fiction novels and an uncle whose novel went unpublished. Schlink says, "As a young man I had written poems and stories and I always loved crime novels. I didn't think that much about it, but in retrospect I think the appeal of writing crime novels is that you develop a problem and you solve it, which is similar to my work as a lawyer. I wanted to write something with suspense that people read on the train to and from work. Crime fiction also makes a critique of society."

He published his first novel in 1990 and then embarked on a trilogy of detective books featuring Dr Gerhard Selb, a former Nazi prosecutor who saw the error of his ways and turned private detective. The final part of the trilogy was published in Germany last year and all three will be published in the UK next year. They deal with Germany's post-war history, in particular the Third Reich's impact on the federal republic, student unrest, and the two Germanys.

Selb is himself slightly outside of the law. The police and the legal system would not be able to cope with the crimes he deals with, but his more unconventional approach can provide a basic level of justice. Dr Beate Dreike of the German department at Cork University says Schlink's fiction is a sophisticated critique of the limits of the law, and that for some crimes, particularly those committed many years ago, the law is an inadequate instrument of justice.

"That is the case in the Selb novels. Also, in The Reader, he poses several questions about justice and the judiciary; is it legitimate to judge actions and crimes that were committed under a different system of law? What is the meaning of punishment? And what is the validity of the verdict, considering Hanna was unable to defend herself adequately?

"Justice follows an objective order - an ideal - but then you have to ask 'what is the ideal?' It was Aristotle who pointed out that you have to treat everyone the same, but at the same time you must look at individual cases and circumstances. One criticism of the book, from people who treat it as Holocaust literature, is that he doesn't come to a proper judgment of Hanna. But how could he? He isn't writing a book about the Holocaust. I think he is writing a book about the law and what it can achieve and how we must not expect too much from it."

Schlink acknowledges that "sometimes I see afterwards that my writing is linked to a problem I deal with as a legal philosopher. But I never think 'this is an interesting problem, let me deal with it in my literature'."

That the book is so open to so many interpretations has been part of its appeal. Schlink acknowledges, however, that he has been criticised for not unambiguously condemning Hanna.

He says: "It was very interesting that in Israel and New York the older generation liked the book, but among my generation I was more than once told it shouldn't have been a problem for Michael, or for me, to condemn. I've heard that criticism several times but never from the older generation, people who have lived through it."

He says he knew he was potentially playing with fire by dealing with such contentious material. "So without writing a piece saying why I wrote the book and what I meant, I have tried to be as clear as possible. But I think there is more to it than just condemning, period. The very first review of The Reader made this accusation but thank God it didn't go on in that direction."

The issue that the Oprah audience latched onto was one he did not expect. He was asked about Hanna's "abuse" of Michael and the pattern of the abused abusing.

"The first part of the Oprah show was all about that," he says. "But child abuse is something one can talk about. I said it is interesting, but from a European perspective a rather strange way to look at it. They were interested in hearing that and the conversation turned to something else."

Schlink has taught European law at a college in America and says he likes the country and the culture. "But the older I get the more I realise I really am a European. I wouldn't want to live there, although I really enjoy going there."

He had his share of limousines and star treatment when in America and his friend Michael Schröter says he has become more comfortable and self-assured when moving in elevated circles.

"But the main change in him over the years is that he has got softer and more open to his emotions. He is more willing to give in and not to press every point home in a discussion."

Perhaps the fact that love is the primary linking strand between the stories in the new collection is an indication of this change, but Schlink says, "I had been thinking about these themes for a very long time, many years before I started on The Reader. They still interest me. They are recurring. I had a process of finding my language and still do. I knew what I wanted to write but I needed to find the language to say it. It's not that I can choose this style or that style but I want to tell the story as straightforwardly as I can. The process of finding my language is ongoing."

He is currently negotiating to work part-time at the university so as to allow more time to write, and says he is only just appreciating what the success of The Reader could mean. "I think I am too old for it to have really changed me. Perhaps it would have been different if I'd had that success aged 34 rather than 54. But stupid as it may sound, I am still realising very gradually the freedom that money can give. That is what is interesting. I don't have an erotic relationship with cars or anything like that, but now I can buy more time."

His father died 14 years ago but his mother is still alive and her response to his success has been influential. "She is obviously somewhat proud and happy that her child has done well," Schlink says.

"But more than anything else she is concerned that her children do good in the world. She always encourages me still to take my teaching as seriously as I can, not to become arrogant, to reply to all the letters I get because people take time to write to me and deserve a reply.

"I think that is something we have to do in this world. We must try to leave it a better place than we found it. When friends encourage me to give up the university and the courts completely to write because they know that I enjoy it so much, I wonder if perhaps I will have too much fun. I'll be doing something just for myself. Doing something that other people can benefit from was an important part of the way I was brought up. And no matter what else has happened to me, that is still important in the way I want to live my life."

Life at a glance: Bernhard Schlink

Born: July 6 1944, Bethel, Germany.

Education: Grammar school, Heidelberg; Free University, West Berlin; further study and teaching at universities in Heidelberg, Darmstadt and Bielefeld.